Darryl Chan's Cocktails in a Martin Brudnizki Room
A small, wood-paneled hotel bar inside The Fifth Avenue Hotel where Darryl Chan is building cocktails around cities and Martin Brudnizki built a room around a fireplace.
The room seats fewer people than a mid-sized restaurant kitchen, and the fireplace is doing more work than any single piece of furniture in a New York hotel bar has any right to. Martin Brudnizki designed this — the same eye behind Fouquet's NYC — and the dark wood paneling, red velvet, and hung portraits read as a bar that would rather look like a private library than a hotel lounge. It sits on the ground floor of The Fifth Avenue Hotel in NoMad, separate from Café Carmellini downstairs, and it opens at five every night.
Darryl Chan runs the drinks. The programme is built around places — a rum-and-scotch clarified cocktail that nods to Cebu, a star anise and yuzu whiskey sour reminiscent of Kochi, a Milk Punch with gin, Earl Grey, cucumber and blackberries. The bar fare is priced to match the neighborhood, with Royal Ossetra Caviar service at $195. This is a pre-dinner bar in a hotel where dinner is already expensive, and it acts like one.
Brudnizki built one of the best small rooms in NoMad, and Darryl Chan is pouring drinks that earn the address.
Editorial Deep
Chan builds the menu around cities. A rum-and-scotch clarified cocktail nods to Cebu with calamansi and bay leaf. A whiskey sour reaches for Kochi with star anise and yuzu. The Milk Punch — gin, Earl Grey, cucumber, blackberries — is the one that turns up on the venue's own Instagram, and it is the drink to lead with if you have never been. Clarified, aromatic, finished with care rather than shaken and slid across the bar.
Brudnizki's small trick is that the room feels like it was inherited rather than built in 2023. Dark wood paneling on every wall, a carved stone fireplace anchoring one end, red velvet on the upholstery, portraits hung close together at a height that reads as a house rather than a hotel. Lighting is low and comes from lamps and sconces rather than downlights, which is why photographs of the room never quite convey what sitting in it feels like.
Pre-dinner is the tell. Between six and eight the room fills with couples about to go downstairs to Café Carmellini, hotel guests in the clothes they wore to dinner, and a smaller number of neighborhood regulars who have figured out that a small hotel bar in NoMad is a better first drink than the sidewalks around Madison Square Park. After nine it thins and gets quieter, which is when the room is at its best. The crowd is well-dressed without being a scene, and nobody is queueing behind your stool waiting for it to open up.
The $195 Royal Ossetra caviar service is the trap. It is beautifully done — crème fraîche, warm potato croquettes — but ordering it here means spending fine-dining money in a bar an hour before you spend fine-dining money at dinner. Skip it, and cocktails at $25 keep things on the expensive side of NoMad but within range of what a Brudnizki room with a serious bar programme charges.
Come back at seven on a Tuesday, sit by the fireplace, order the Milk Punch and the Cebu-inspired clarified cocktail, and stay for one more. That is the version of this bar that justifies the address. It is a pre-dinner room by design and it is very good at that specific job — long sessions belong somewhere with more chairs and more air. Don't book it for a group of six celebrating something, and don't come at ten expecting a late-night bar; the reservation cap of four and the five-o'clock open both tell you what this room is for.
Order this
Drink this.
The Milk Punch (gin, Earl Grey, cucumber, blackberries), the Hot Dog Au Poivre, and Marcona stuffed olives with a martini
“A small Brudnizki room and a serious cocktail programme, priced for the neighborhood and best before dinner.”
Go for a pre-dinner drink by the fireplace with the Milk Punch and one of Chan's location cocktails. Skip the caviar service and the wines by the glass — the cocktails are the reason to come. Book exactly fourteen days out on Resy, cap the party at four, and use Notify Me if the slot you want is gone.
The Verdict
